While doing innovation and research, your path is fuzzy and unpredictable and does not fit into a predefined scope that the team has to commit on at the beginni

While doing innovation and research, your path is fuzzy and unpredictable and does not fit into a predefined scope that the team has to commit on at the beginning of the sprint. This is because you are doing it wrong. Innovation and research is valuable. It has a business cost, and may not result in business value in all cases. That's totally fine! But it's still important to recognise that so that we can understand the costs and benefits that are being realised. I pretty frequently engage in long-running research tasks within a Scrum team. The approach that works is to be clear about what the deliverable output is. Perhaps this takes the form of a plan of action, or documentation of the research. If the whole scope of that research project doesn't fit into a sprint, then that's a red flag – break it up. I've had literally no problems with this approach and it's made the process of understanding the business costs of long-running, uncertain projects much clearer.